Little

Instant Phonetic Englishization: . ehk!, like the English word ‘ache’ but
ending with an ejective.

With the Milluk
word that means ‘little’, ‘small’, we are compelled to recognize Front K as a
phoneme / k̯ / in Milluk, in order not to add an additional vowel phoneme into
our phonemic analysis of Milluk.If we
represent the Milluk word eik’ ‘little’, ‘small’, which is phonetically [ ʔe·k̯ʼ
] as / ʔæk̯ʼ / in a phonemic representation, then we can predict the phonetic
vowel [ e ] that we hear from Lolly Metcalf in this word as an allophone of the
Milluk vowel phoneme / æ /. The
palatalized nature of the Front K phoneme / k̯ / conditions the higher vowel
height, just as the high front vowel of the noun suffix / -is / conditions the
higher vowel height that we hear from Annie Miner Peterson in the several times
in the phonographic recordings that we hear her say the word / gwæis / ‘girl,
young woman’ as [ gwɛis ] and especially as [ gweis ].The variation that we hear from Lolly Metcalf
in her pronunciations of the Milluk word yeis ‘mouth’ shows us that there is a
range of vowel heights that can be heard for that word.

With the Milluk word ktsaas ‘ashes’
on the other hand, the front k which begins the word conditions what follows
it, making for the kind of transition between the consonants at the beginning
of that word, which we consistently hear from Lolly as involving [ ɪ̥ ] a
voiceless high front vowel.In other
words, because the word meaning ‘ashes’ begins with a front k [k̯], the
transition between the initial consonant [ k̯ ] and the following affricate
consonant [ ts ] sounds like a whispered version of the English word
‘kit’.